Gov. Rick Perry posted this photo Friday on his campaign website. In a tweet, the Republican governor said he did so to remind President Barack Obama "how much he added to natl debt," though the most Obama contributed, even throwing in some spending he inherited from former President George W. Bush, is $5.4 trillion, according to PolitiFact.

It was accompanied by this tweet: “RT @GovernorPerry Since @BarackObama has forgotten how much he added to natl debt #ForAll our kids to pay off… pic.twitter.com/U9OyZrgo”

The “ForAll” hashtag was a reference to this week’s initiative by President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign to persuade young adults to write on their hands what progress means to them, and then take a picture of it and post it on social media. As is common in these things, the Obama camp’s hashtag got hijacked by the other side.

By 4:55 p.m. Friday, Perry’s message had been retweeted more than 2,100 times.

More background: Perry may have been referring to Obama’s comment to David Letterman on the “Late Show” earlier this week that he didn’t “precisely” recall the amount of the national debt. See this Washington Post blog post on that. (Debt discussion begins 5 minutes in, and Obama’s statement he doesn’t know is at 6 minutes, 42 seconds.)

According to PolitiFact Ohio, though, it’s misleading to suggest — as U.S. House Speaker John Boehner has in recent days, and Perry’s tweet and photo taken out of context could suggest — that the entire $16 trillion national debt is Obama’s doing.

As colleague Todd Gillman blogged earlier, Democrats trained fire Thursday on Ryan — and by extension, Hensarling — for harping on growth of the national debt and the $700 billion in cuts to Medicare Advantage plans that will kick in under President Barack Obama’s health care law. Democrats noted that they and one other House Republican serving on the Simpson-Bowles panel walked away from a grand deficit-cutting plan because it called for higher taxes and didn’t cut Medicare and Medicaid enough.

“In many respects, we consider that to be a validation of all the work that we’ve been doing for two years,” he said, calling Obama “clueless” on economics. “And once we get that guy out of the White House, once we send Harry Reid back to the gambling houses of Las Vegas,” the economy should start humming, he said.

Bankrupting America

The billboard, which will go up near the Carpenter Freeway and Regal Row intersection, will be one of four similar billboards in Texas. The others will be in San Antonio, Austin and Houston.

But it’s actually part of a national ad campaign by a group called Bankrupting America. The organization’s spokesman, Jim Landry, would only say that the ad buy was six figures.

Landry said the high concentration of political ads on television have people tuning out, so the billboards are the way to go right now.

Bankrupting America will have their series of billboards in Texas, as well as nine other states. The others are Ohio, Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, Nevada, Iowa, Colorado, New Mexico and Oklahoma.

That makes solidly Republican Texas and Oklahoma anomalies; the other states are all expected to be in play in the presidential election.

Landry said that electoral calculus didn’t factor into the decision.

“We’re a nonpartisan organization,” Landry said. “When we were looking at states, we wanted to make sure the issue was on the radar of both parties.”

He also said that it’s about bang for the undisclosed buck. Plus, Texas is a diverse state that has a lot of drivers and many, many highways, he said.

But the same could be said of California, a solidly Democratic state.

“That’s just not a state we decided to hit,” Landry said. “I can’t say there is a specific reason we decided not to hit California.”

Republican nominee Mitt Romney also took a break from swing states and targeted Texas in a recent web video, although that could be viewed as a larger play for Hispanic voters.

And President Barack Obama suggested during a fundraising trip that Texas would be a battleground state “soon,” but he was shaking the money tree at the time.